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North Carolina Tar Heels (official thread)

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http://www.businessweek.com/article...ball-academic-fraud-and-implicit-racism#r=rss
The Scandal Bowl: Tar Heels Football, Academic Fraud, and Implicit Racism
By Paul M. BarrettJanuary 02, 2014

The recent criminal indictment of an African American studies scholar at the University of North Carolina sheds dismaying light on how big-time college sports corrupt academics. This scandal, unfolding since 2011, has the potential to destroy a vaunted football program at a prestigious public university. The impact could be—and ought to be—far broader than that of the Penn State child-rape debacle. That’s because the deceit in Chapel Hill points to more systemic weaknesses than the failure in University Park to stop one monster coach who preyed on little boys. And the Tar Heels fiasco adds race to the toxic mixture of athletics and rank hypocrisy.
Last month a grand jury in Orange County, N.C., indicted Julius Nyang’oro for defrauding UNC by accepting payment for teaching a no-show course on “blacks in North Carolina.” The 19 students in AFAM 280 were current or former members of the Tar Heels football team, allegedly steered to the phantom class by academic advisers who sought to help elite athletes maintain high enough grades to remain eligible for competition. AFAM 280 was one of dozens of courses offered by North Carolina’s African & Afro-American Studies Department, formerly chaired by Nyang’oro, that never actually met, according to investigators. Known for rigorous academics, North Carolina allegedly operated a Potemkin department since the late 1990s. (The New York Times drew my attention to the Chapel Hill scandal with a New Year’s Day front-page article; the Raleigh News & Observer has been all over the story for more than two years.)
The scope of the apparent wrongdoing defies belief. One investigation by a former governor of North Carolina, James Martin, found that as many as 560 unauthorized grade changes were made, often with forged faculty signatures. Nyang’oro, a native of Tanzania who ran the Afro-American department for 20 years, even though he frequently spent extended periods of time overseas, has refused so far to explain himself publicly. His criminal defense lawyer says the disgraced professor didn’t violate the law and is being used as a scapegoat.

Whether the highly unusual criminal charges against Nyang’oro will stick is an open question. Prosecutors face a major challenge in proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the ex-professor, who retired from the university in July 2012, defrauded a former employer where numerous other employees and senior officials almost certainly caught a whiff of something going bad in the Afro-Am building.
Meanwhile, several observations, based on my first perusal of the grim dispatches from North Carolina:
• UNC is trying—unconvincingly—to limit its culpability by blaming Nyang’oro. The professor’s academic career appears to be over, and justifiably so. But he cannot possibly have executed this massive lie on his own. The university’s provost, James Dean Jr., told the Times that UNC couldn’t have anticipated or detected Nyang’oro’s 14-year-long reign of fraud. “Universities for a very long time have been based on trust,” the provost said. “One of the ramifications of this is that now we can no longer operate on trust.” That’s laughable. I predict that further investigation will reveal that the fraud reached deep into the Tar Heel athletic hierarchy and that senior academic officials will also turn out to have been at least aware of improprieties. Now that he’s been indicted, Nyang’oro has an incentive to tell prosecutors who knew what he was doing and who encouraged him to do it. “There’s been one side of this story that has been put forth in the press,” the former professor’s lawyer told reporters in December. Now Nyang’oro “is going to have an opportunity to present his side.”

UNC and the NCAA are trying to conceal that the fraud was specifically designed to pad the transcripts of varsity athletes. The News & Observer’s reporting shows a clear pattern of both the university and the National Collegiate Athletic Association attempting to deflect attention from the connection between Tar Heel athletics and the no-show Afro-Am courses. Even though athletes made up a disproportionate percentage of the suspect class rosters, the presence of a few nonathletes has prompted UNC and the NCAA to play down the sports-related nature of the corruption. UNC has sought to limit the release of information that would shed more light on that connection, the News & Observer reported in November. The university “has refused the N&O’s request, for example, for basketball and football enrollments in the earliest known fraudulent classes.” It is past time for UNC to bare all and clean house.
• Implicit racism colors this entire episode. One of the most horrifying aspects of the exploitation of high-level college athletes, especially football and basketball players, is the vastly disproportionate impact on African American “students.” Too many black athletes with unrealistic dreams of NBA or NFL stardom arrive on campus unprepared academically and are allowed to depart with little meaningful classroom education. Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA and now a critic of its practices, has described the “plantation mentality resurrected and blessed by today’s campus executives”—painful words, carefully chosen. Would UNC have tolerated the thorough undermining of an entire academic department other than Afro-American studies? Hard to picture. Could Nyang’oro and those who presumably aided and abetted him have come up with course titles any more likely to please skeptics of black-oriented scholarship?
The first three classes confirmed to have been fraudulent, according to the News & Observer, pretended to offer students training in the Swahili language. An old-time Carolina Klan member couldn’t have conjured that detail in his most virulent daydream.
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It really demonstrates the joke that college football and basketball have become and is another strong argument in favor of setting up minor leagues for the thugs and retards that should never step foot onto a college campus.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/07/us/ncaa-athletes-reading-scores/index.html

CNN tried to pry some data out of various universities, the results are sadly not surprising.

You can't bring morons who read at a fifth grade level and drop them down into the middle of a freshman class with an average SAT score of 1300 and expect anything other than fraud and farce. Create a minor league for them.
 
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Do you even stereotype, Bro? So anyone who has a problem with top tier universities admitting borderline illiterate students to play sports is some D&D playing nerd, hopelessly picked on by the "jocks?" And just when I was starting to soften on letting Nowledge into the Big Ten.

Are you really so naive as to believe that this doesn't go on? Do you think Nebraska refused to release their data because the scores are too high?

Hell, we came off better than I had feared, but there were still far too many football players testing out at sixth, fifth and even third grade reading levels.
 
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It really demonstrates the joke that college football and basketball have become and is another strong argument in favor of setting up minor leagues for the thugs and retards that should never step foot onto a college campus.
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I'd like to set up a wide array of well-funded adoption agencies so children and pets do not get stuck in bad situations. It's a fun idea that isn't financially viable, as is yours.
Do you even stereotype, Bro? So anyone who has a problem with top tier universities admitting borderline illiterate students to play sports is some D&D playing nerd, hopelessly picked on by the "jocks?"
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A stance that seems like a pretty slippery slope. Either you admit subpar-students to play football and generate huge dollars for your university or you shut down college athletics.
 
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jwinslow said:
A stance that seems like a pretty slippery slope. Either you admit subpar-students to play football and generate huge dollars for your university or you shut down college athletics.
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I dont see why people feel this way, if colleges didnt admit substandard students there would still be plenty of superstars.. maybe some of the parity might go away but even that is questionable. there are plenty of athletes who can make the grades.. and the result would be actual students getting scholarships they would otherwise be denied.. i dont know about everyone else but i for one would still watch... the nfl has the best athletes now but i still prefer the college game.. i think id enjoy it even more if it had some integrity.
 
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jwinslow said:
A stance that seems like a pretty slippery slope. Either you admit subpar-students to play football and generate huge dollars for your university or you shut down college athletics.
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There's admitting kids with SAT scores a little lower than most of their class and there's admitting kids that can't read or do basic math. What disturbs me about stories like this is that there doesn't even seem to be an attempt to draw a line.
 
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jwinslow said:
I'd like to set up a wide array of well-funded adoption agencies so children and pets do not get stuck in bad situations. It's a fun idea that isn't financially viable, as is yours.
A stance that seems like a pretty slippery slope. Either you admit subpar-students to play football and generate huge dollars for your university or you shut down college athletics.
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I don't mind giving an athlete some kind of boost in admissions, but we're talking about letting kids in that have zero chance of ever graduating or taking advantage of a university education in the least. Let a kid in with a 9th or 10th grade reading level? OK, because with some tutoring and support, there's a chance that kid will get an education. Let one in with a 3rd grade reading level? To my thinking, that is essentially illiterate. I shouldn't even say let them in but rather "force them to go" because that kid would much rather be making 40 or 50 grand playing minor league ball than going through the charade of being a college student. The straw man argument that usually gets raised is about special admissions considerations for elite musical students. Somehow, I don't think that cello prodigy is rolling onto campus with an 800 SAT score and fifth grade reading level.

I also don't believe that thinning out the retards and illiterates is going to so damage the talent pool in college football that it would need to be shut down. Yes, we would lose some to the minors, but there are still plenty of football recruits at Ohio State every year that both arrive with average or better standards and many of whom I believe would continue to take the college scholarship route. College football will still survive. The stadiums will still be packed. and the television contracts will still be there. It would, however, bring a warped system back into some semblance of balance.

I believe that it's the morally and ethically right thing to do for two reasons. First it ends the charade of borderline illiterates being brought onto selective, competitive (and in some cases elite) college campuses solely to compete in athletics--campuses from which they don't have a shot in hell of ever receiving a meaningful education much less a degree. And second, it actually gives those athletes the free choice of avoiding the charade in the first place and instead earning a living at their one skill in life while preparing for their shot at the majors.
 
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I'd have more respect if they just let the Universities sponsor their teams, paid some kind of standard salary to every kid on the team, and didn't make athletes even go to the school, so long as they committed to stay on the team for 3 or 4 years, or until 21.
 
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One of the underpinning issues is that the NFL basically forces everyone to go to College for 3 years.
Take that restriction away, and the situation improves. Could've used NFL Europe as minor league but I think it's long dead at this point.
Arena Football, XFL, et. al. seem like the only options at this point. There is evidently room in the sports market for 2nd tier football... it's just how does it get structured.
I also think it would definitely lead to CFB losing a lot of its luster, for better or worse.
 
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